Quibbling over a hockey stick while the planet burns

After challenges were raised to the famous/infamous “hockey stick” graphic used to illustrate the planet’s warming trend over the past millennium, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations asked some statisticians to get to the bottom of the debate.

At a hearing yesterday, the statisticians, chosen by Texas Republican Rep. Joe Barton, and led by Edward Wegman from the Center for Computational Statistics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., shared their results.

The group concluded that the researchers responsible for the work had “too much reliance on peer review” which they felt was not sufficiently independent, that the paleoclimate community isolates itself from other statisticians, and that the conclusion that the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium was not supported by the analysis. You can catch more on the hearing in this segment of NPR’s Morning Edition.

Washington Rep. Jay Inslee challenged the whole exercise:

“Instead of really engaging congressional talent in figuring out how to deal with this problem, we try to poke little pin holes in one particular statistical conclusion of one particular study when the overwhelming evidence is that we have to act to deal with this global challenge.”

He continued to ask Wegman if all the international scientific academies that have concluded that global warming is real and impacted by human-created pollution should reconsider their findings in light of his analysis. Wegman answered: “Of course not.”